Forefronting the Socio-Ecological in Savanna Landscapes through Their Spatial and Temporal Contingencies

Kelley Crews,Kenneth Young

doi:10.3390/land2030452

Abstract

Landscape changes and the processes driving them have been a critical component in both research and management efforts of savanna systems. These dynamics impact human populations, wildlife, carbon storage, and general spatio-temporal dynamism in response to both anthropomorphic and climatic shifts. Both biophysical and human agents of change can be identified by isolating their respective spatial, temporal, and organizational contingencies. However, we argue here that a significant portion of savanna research has either considered humans as exogenous (e.g., via enacting regional or broader policies) or somewhat spatio-temporally removed from the system (e.g., as in many protected areas with limited current human habitation). Examples from African savanna research and particularly those systems of southern Africa are thus reviewed and used to model a stylized or prototypical savanna system and contingencies. Such an approach allows for a richer socio-temporal integration of theories and data on past biophysical and human histories to facilitate an improved framework for understanding savanna systems and their complex contingencies as socio-ecological landscapes.

Highlights

It has long been recognized that the interplay among spatial and temporal processes collectively shapes and modifies the spatial patterns that constitute the Earth’s land cover at a particular point in time [1,2,3,4,5,6]
In particular the spatio-temporal patterns that characterize natural, anthropogenic, and hybrid land covers have been explored through approaches as wide-ranging as hybrid impacts on species persistence [7], socio-ecological statistical and temporal variances in biodiversity conservation [8], and land use assessment change scenarios [9]
We seek to pull together the common but still underexplored threads of such efforts, complemented by our own field studies in savanna systems, as a means of better integrating ongoing efforts to examine natural and human interactive processes across dynamically interacting temporal and spatial scales and potentialities. We refer to these as spatial and temporal contingencies, and argue that this perspective indicates that savannas might be denoted more properly with regards to how they exist over time rather than in what state they might be at a given instant of time

Summary

Introduction

It has long been recognized that the interplay among spatial and temporal processes collectively shapes and modifies the spatial patterns that constitute the Earth’s land cover at a particular point in time [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Land use/land cover change (LULCC) studies in particular have offered spatially explicit, theoretically rich, and analytically sophisticated case studies and modeling efforts that include assessing contributory components to landscape change such as: the effects of adding spatial constraints; temporal controls tied to concurrent climatic and institutional change; access inequalities, migration, and other socio-behavioral data; and multi-scale management scenarios and outcomes. What this suite of approaches collectively offers is a way to isolate and identify scale-related and scale-specific phenomena. The theoretical worth of a contingencies framework in dynamic savanna systems is discussed, with the goal of facilitating the adaption of previous studies of savanna landscape change in limited human-interaction settings to those that more realistically present the socio-ecological context of southern Africa’s savannas

Landscape Dynamism and Spatial Contingency

Landscape Dynamism and Temporal Contingency

Contingencies in Practice

Field Observations of Socio-Ecological Savannas

Future Prospects